Higher Ed’s Politicization Feels Inevitable, but It Doesn’t Need to Be
There is widespread agreement that higher education is politicized, but there is disagreement over who is to blame. The left argues President Trump and various red states enacting policies are injecting conservative dogma into teaching and research. The right argues that the left politicized academia over the past several decades, and that the new policies are merely trying to reverse the current politicization. There is some truth to both stories.
Yet universities really are dominated by the left, and their domination has grown over time. Surveys of faculty reveal that left-leaning professors outnumbered their right-leaning counterparts by 2.8 to 1 in 1989, a disparity that widened to 4.9 to 1 in 2017. Another survey (with different methodology) indicates that this might have grown to 6.9 to 1 by 2021. Analyses of voter registration at top colleges reveal an even more lopsided imbalance of 11.5 to 1. Political donations reveal an extreme imbalance of 28 to 1among the 20 colleges whose staff donated the most.
In a country split close to 50/50 politically, it may seem curious that universities are so politically lopsided. Yet current institutional practices magnify a natural imbalance, producing faculties that are far more lopsided than the public at large.
Higher education will naturally tilt left, of course. Left-leaning students outnumber right-leaning students and are more likely to express an interest in graduate school. These facts alone would explain a natural imbalance among faculty of around 2.1 to 1.
Yet this natural imbalance tends to reinforce itself and, left unchecked, it tends to become more pronounced as other institutional forces reinforce it.
The first magnification is motivated reasoning. Most people will uncritically accept ideas and findings that conform to their views but will subject findings that threaten their views to more scrutiny. This means that right-leaning scholars and their findings will face more criticism than their left-leaning counterparts. Diligent scholars can fight this impulse, but not everyone tries and even fewer succeed, with the result that those on the right are disproportionately likely to be screened out over quality concerns.
Since existing faculty are heavily involved in hiring new faculty, outright discrimination by existing faculty has also magnified the initial imbalance. For instance, 4 in 10 American academics indicated that they would refuse to hire a Trump supporter as a colleague. The more lopsided the academic field, the more overt the ideological discrimination. Social psychology is one of the more politically skewed fields, and 82 percent of liberal social psychologists admitted that they would discriminate against a conservative scholar when hiring faculty colleagues.
A particularly pernicious practice that exacerbated the existing ideological imbalance are political loyalty oaths in the form of required diversity, equity, and inclusion statements. For example, at the University of California, Berkeley, more than 75 percent of candidates were eliminated from consideration for not pledging sufficient loyalty to woke ideas.
When you add motivated reasoning, discrimination, and political loyalty oaths to an existing natural imbalance, it is no longer surprising that the left dominates universities. Rather, it is surprising that it took so long for it to happen.
Anyone who values the mission of universities should fight political domination. But efforts to reverse their politicization run into a seemingly inescapable problem: external hiring of faculty will not work because only faculty can accurately gauge the qualifications of faculty applicants. On the other hand, internal hiring is hopeless since existing faculty either passive watched or actively participated in the leftist takeover of universities.
Fortunately, there is a solution to depoliticize universities – establish heterodox centers, or colleges within the existing university, that would add missing perspectives and compete with the traditional departments. Any university board could establish such a center on their campus, and state governments could mandate them at public colleges in their state. There are five key features of the heterodox center or college.
First, the center would be largely independent from the existing college. It should be meant to challenge the status quo, and therefore the status quo cannot be given veto power over it.
Second, these centers would offer competition for students. Previous efforts at ideological diversification have been underwhelming because the new centers were often only able to offer a limited selection of courses, often just a few electives and maybe a minor or major. The result was that the dissidents were effectively quarantined in intellectual ghettos. The solution is to allow the new center to teach any class required for graduation. This will ensure that those with heterodox views cannot be quarantined, while also introducing competition for students that will reduce monopoly power and lead to higher-quality education.
Third, the centers should enjoy equitable funding. Historically, heterodox centers have been required to pay the university, while other departments and centers were paid by the university. That needs to change. The new centers should be funded the same way the rest of the university is. If other departments are funded based on enrollments, then the heterodox center or college should be too.
Fourth, the new center needs to be able to hire without interference by the existing faculty. The only way to depoliticize a field like social psychology is to exclude them from the hiring process for the new center.
Finally, the centers should be provided a level playing field. The core idea is to create a university that hosts a variety of independent centers that compete against each other. This requires fair competition, whereby the university doesn’t privilege some centers or departments over others.
The politicalization of higher education is real. Establishing heterodox centers is the most promising way to reverse this.
